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Making Music

One of our tech savvy educators, James, posted an interesting link in the forum for a free music program, Notepad. I was getting ready to write up a post about the benefits of using Garage Band in the classroom, but since it’s a Mac only program, this new program would help Mac and Windows users alike. Notepad is the free (magic word!) offshoot of the highly successful, and powerful, music composing software known as Finale. It’s fairly easy to use and compose music with, and allows even novice composers to write songs. The program even lets you add lyrics to your song.

James has used Notepad to write small pieces of music to accompany his first graders’ poetry, but it could easily be used by older students to write their own, copyright-free, music for digital reports or as background music for a presentation. Middle grades could have students write their own song and lyrics as a creative task for journaling or processing new information. Feel free to join the forum and send James your questions about this creative tool.

Thanks for the great site James!

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2 comments

I used Notepad when I taught a guitar class 2 years ago. It was great for printing up sheet music (really, just chord charts) for any song or any practice progression I wanted. I never used it for my personal projects, but I keep it in case I ever teach guitar again.